When the air turns crisp and the seasons begin to turn, a familiar ache often settles into our chests. We tend to label this ache as nostalgia—a bittersweet longing for a bygone year, an easier chapter, or a youth we believe time has stolen. But nostalgia is rarely about the passage of time. It is a quiet, persistent compass pointing directly to the parts of ourselves we left behind in the name of survival, duty, and adulthood. If you want to reclaim your magic, the journey does not begin by trying to resurrect the past, but by daring to inhabit your own wild, boundless spirit once again.
Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.
The Portal on the Third Floor
The third floor of the house I grew up in was a portal to anywhere.
The space was anchored by a massive stone fireplace and hearth, raised about a foot off the floor. The walls were almost entirely glass. Light poured in from every angle, and I could look out to hemlocks and pines and maples from any place in the room.
My sister, Anne, and I would use the stone hearth as our personal dancing platform. We’d crank up the stereo and imitate the dancers we had seen on television shows like Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In and The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour. Our bare feet moving on the giant rocks, entirely untethered from self-consciousness or restraint.
While our mountain town was small and quiet, our capacity for belief was infinite. We could imagine anything and believe it into existence.
We lived in a perpetual, sunlit, imaginary world, wearing white go-go boots with square heels, brightly colored mini-skirts, hair gathered in “palm trees” on top of our heads and tied with ribbons.
We also both owned nylon Batman capes that we knew, with absolute certainty, gave us the power to fly.
And even when we tested that certainty—launching ourselves off the high, grassy bank beside the house, only to plummet and meet the hard ground below—our belief didn’t waver. We rose, brushed the grass from our knees, and still believed.
The magic held.
When the Cape Came Off
I carried that energy fiercely into junior high, high school, college, and a couple of decades beyond: an unshakable knowing that if I only let my imagination roam free and I worked hard enough, I could manifest any reality, sculpt any destiny, and draw anyone I wanted into my orbit.
This was the absolute truth of my life. Until, with the devastation of financial ruin, divorce, and loss, it wasn’t. Everything fell apart.
When the storm clears, you don’t always realize what it took from you. It happens incrementally. You trade the cape for a heavy winter coat. You exchange the go-go boots for sensible shoes meant for walking through ash.
One day, my son, Adam, asked me a question that broke me wide open: Why aren’t you playful anymore, Mom?
In that moment, I knew. Good fortune hadn’t abandoned me. I had abandoned me.
I had severed the wires to my vast imagination. I had forgotten my native tongue—the ability to build worlds from nothing and live boldly inside them. I had misplaced my sense of mischief, the thrill of adventure, the holy right to dream without a ceiling.
The girl in the cape was buried under years of survival, duty, and the exhaustion of keeping the world spinning.
Right there, in the wreckage, I vowed to get her back.
It was not a sudden resurrection. It was a slow, deliberate excavation that took years. I reclaimed her piece by piece, inch by inch. I called her back song by song, tuning my ear to rhythms and lyrics I’d long ignored.
I bought the funky skirts and impractical shoes again. I initiated silly, free-spirited dances in the middle of the living room. I began traveling the world again. Slowly, the phantom magic of the Batman cape returned to my shoulders, bringing back that ancient, defiant knowing: I could fly, no matter how steep the drop.
How to Get Your Magic Back
Is there something essential to the architecture of who you truly are that you have lost touch with? A forgotten skill? A buried hobby? A fierce desire, a discarded trait, or a wild, luminous approach to the way you once viewed the world?
Take it back.
Do not wait for permission, and do not wait for the weariness to lift on its own.
Decide, right now, to unearth it. Dig through the topsoil of your obligations. Bring it back into the light. Lean over the faded memory of who you were, blow air into its lungs, and press hard against its chest. Pump until the flatline breaks, until the monitors sing, and the rhythm of a restored heartbeat floods the room.
Inside her, inside him, inside you—it still lives.
It never left. It was only waiting for us to remember. The aching nostalgia we carry in our chests is not actually for days gone by or for a youth we may believe time stole. It is for the person we stopped being. It is for the selves we forgot we were.
Go put on the cape.
